Daniela Schiller

Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Daniela Schiller talks to Roger Bingham about how she got into science and reviews research, including her own, on modifying fear memories.

Daniela Schiller is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine where she studies the neural mechanisms underlying emotional control. Because the environment we live in is constantly changing, our learned emotional responses need to be continuously updated to appropriately reflect current circumstances. Understanding the neural mechanisms that make such emotional flexibility may shed light on the impairments leading to anxiety disorders and may also promote new forms of treatment. As a post-doc with Elizabeth Phelps and Joseph LeDoux, she worked on the recovery of extinguished fear, elucidation of the neural circuitry of flexible fear reversal, and how fear motivates instrumental responding. To extend these findings to more complex situations unique to humans, she's investigating how emotional systems are recruited to rapidly evaluate others during initial social encounters. Fittingly, she also plays the drums in LeDoux's Heavy Mental band, The Amygdaloids.